Recover an overwritten file in word

[Charles Smith]

A word file was accidently overwritten and it is very
important that I recover this file. Is there a way that
this can be done. I am not sure that the system recovery
will help or if it was activated.

 

[Bastet]

A word file was accidently overwritten and it is very
important that I recover this file. Is there a way that
this can be done. I am not sure that the system recovery
will help or if it was activated.

System Restore does *NOT* reverse any changes made to documents - only to
installed applications. It is actually very difficult to overwrite a file -
did you not see a box stating "file exists - replace?" or words to that
effect? Anyway, the file is gone - and there is nothing you can do about it.
Just be more careful in future.

 

[Harry Ohrn]

You can try this. It has the potential to work for you
http://www.pcnet-online.com/downloads/docregen.htm MS Word creates a temp
file when it is creating documents. When the document is saved the temp file
is deleted but because files are not actually erased from a hard drive
remnants of the temp file should still exist. Doc Regenerator does find doc
files that have been deleted as I've tried it myself using the demo. I took
an old .DOC file, opened it and changed the contents totally by blocking all
text and typing different information. I then saved the file overwriting the
old data with the new. I then ran DOC Regenerator. Unfortunately it scans
the entire drive so I couldn't just search for a specific file. On an 80 GB
drive this took about 20 minutes (I am running a P4 2.5GHZ with 512 MB DDR)
your times will be different depending on data searched and speed of your
system. You also need to have a secondary location to recover to like a
second hard drive.

Anyway the good news is that it found about 150 .DOC files. The right side
of the screen has a preview. After Previewing a number of files I was able
to find the old data still intact and recovered it. This program is quite
amazing.

Next I copied a fairly large .DOC file to a floppy. I then changed the data
in the file as I did before, blocking all text and overwriting it and saving
it. I closed Word. I then opened Word and opened the document saw that the
file had been overwritten with the new data. I closed it and ran Doc
Regenerator on the floppy. It was able to recover the previously overwritten
data. However it seems to only be able to go back one change so if you made
multiple changes you are not going to get back to previous states.

Good luck and remember that you will need an alternative restore path. If
the file small enough to fit a floppy then you can designate A:\ as the
destination. I haven't tried pointing the destination to a packet formatted
CD-R/W but that should work as well.

 

[Harry Ohrn]

System Restore does *NOT* reverse any changes made to documents - only to
installed applications. It is actually very difficult to overwrite a file -
did you not see a box stating "file exists - replace?" or words to that
effect? Anyway, the file is gone - and there is nothing you can do about it.
Just be more careful in future.

http://www.pcnet-online.com/downloads/docregen.htm It works.

 

[Bastet]

http://www.pcnet-online.com/downloads/docregen.htm It works.

Thanks, Harry - URL filed for future reference.

Bast

 

[Mary Ellen Curtin]

http://www.pcnet-online.com/downloads/docregen.htm

Will this also work in the following case?:

AustralianUser had two files saved, thingone.doc and thingtwo.doc. On
3 hours sleep, she Saved thingtwo.doc As thingone.doc. Now she is
desperate to get thingone.doc back. Autosave was enabled, "not sure
about backup". She has searched her HD for any file with distinctive
thingone words in it, to no avail.

My tech support is a bit difficult because I'm in North America, so I
can't get my actual paws on the system in question.

Mary Ellen
helpful friend

 

[Jim Macklin]

If you did not have saves keep a backup of previous versions
( a feature of WORD) it would take the services of the FBI
to recover the content of a file you over-wrote, unless
there are some temp files that are still saved.


message
| > http://www.pcnet-online.com/downloads/docregen.htm
|
| Will this also work in the following case?:
|
| AustralianUser had two files saved, thingone.doc and
thingtwo.doc. On
| 3 hours sleep, she Saved thingtwo.doc As thingone.doc. Now
she is
| desperate to get thingone.doc back. Autosave was enabled,
"not sure
| about backup". She has searched her HD for any file with
distinctive
| thingone words in it, to no avail.
|
| My tech support is a bit difficult because I'm in North
America, so I
| can't get my actual paws on the system in question.
|
| Mary Ellen
| helpful friend